Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2011/01/18

Summary

These posts written every 2 weeks explain the current state of add-on reviews and other information relevant to add-on developers.

Last week a new version of the Developer Tools was pushed live at AMO. They include a new review process among a ton of other changes. More information here.

Most nominations are being reviewed within 10 days.

Most updates are being reviewed within 5 days.

Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 5 days.

The Review Queues

These stats are taken from the last queue report. It doesn’t include the new preliminary review queue because that was pushed live the day before.

48 new nominations that week. 64 nominations in the queue awaiting review.

86 new updates that week. 55 updates in the queue awaiting review.

791 reviews have been performed by AMO Editors this month.

Firefox 4 Compatibility

Firefox 4 will be released very soon, beta 9 is currently available for download, and AMO already supports 4.0.* as a valid maxVersion. Most of the necessary documentation to upgrade your add-on for Firefox 4 is readily available:

Beta 7 was the first release after the codebase went through feature freeze. This means that no major changes are going to be performed, and add-ons that work correctly on current betas are likely to work in the same way until the final release. Here are some pending issues of Firefox 4 compatibility that haven’t been addressed in other blog posts:

I just posted an explanation about the threading and worker changes in Firefox 4. If your add-on used the Thread Manager and doesn’t work in Firefox 4, that article is meant for you.

Since toolbar buttons are very important for developers and button sizes changed for Firefox 4, I wrote this analysis of toolbar buttons and icons in Firefox 4. One problem was brought up in the comments, which triggered the creation of bug 616472. It has already been fixed at least for Mac, which now accepts 16×16 px icons, and there’s a proposal to provide an automatic filter that converts icons to monochrome, allowing authors to use the same graphic without the colors breaking the general look of Firefox on Mac. Other improvements are being discussed in the bug at the moment and would appear on the next beta if implemented.

The Add-on Bar is supposed to appear automatically when a button or other items are added to it. Bug 616419 was filed for this. It doesn’t look like it will be fixed soon, but an alternate solution is proposed in the comments.

Notes for Developers

Add-on Performance at XUL School. This article is highly recommended to all developers. It explains a few methods to improve add-on performance, including how to easily measure startup times.

The AMO Editor Guide. This new page in the wiki is a comprehensive guide to the work performed by AMO Editors. It will serve as an introductory guide for new editors, and is a step forward in being as transparent as possible with our review process. It’s currently being edited to adjust it to the upcoming review system.